Caitlyn Moss
Article Review: Ontogeny of Strike Performance in Ball Pythons
Article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0944200620300398?via%3Dihub
Journal: Zoology
Author: William G Ryerson
Published: March 24, 2020
The ontogenetic development of an animal is the most informative part of an animal's life. In this article, the author explored ontogenetic strike data. The author wanted to test the interactions between ontogeny and performance. Well known for many morphological shifts during feeding as they develop, snakes are considered "gape-limited" predators (Ryerson, 2020). This means that the prey they can capture is limited by the size of their mouth. However, morphological shifts, such as shifts in head size and skull morphology have evolved to benefit feeding. For example, in Nerodia, a colubrid genus, show a positive relationship between head length and muscle cross-sectional area, gape size, and skull bone size, indicating that as they developed, their feeding mechanics and morphology shifted.
In the experiments, ten ball pythons were purchased less than one month after hatching. All snakes were kept following guidelines from a previous paper. They were fed every two weeks and as they grew, so did their prey size. After each trial period, digital photographs were taken of the snake to determine morphological measurements and to determine if anything had changed. At the end of the experiment, the females had grown larger than the males compared to their snout-vent length, and head length and width had a negative association with their snout-vent length.
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Over the course of the experiment, 347 feeding trials were conducted over all 10 ball pythons. Throughout the experiment, seven variables were tracked: strike duration, strike distance, maximum gape angle, maximum gape distance, velocity of gape opening, velocity of gape closing, and velocity of the strike. It was found that strike distance was positively associated with the velocity of the strike.
Throughout their development, it was found that ball pythons exhibit a decline in performance. Juvenile ball pythons strike with the same kinematics as other adult snakes and when they grew up, the strike velocity, maximum gape, gape opening velocity, and strike outcome declined.
3 comments:
Wow, what an interesting article. What do you think is the significance behind these findings?
Very interesting. Was it a surprising finding that the adults had lower performance than juveniles?
Really interesting information! Did they mention if being raised in captivity could have anything to do with the adults having a less powerful strike? I feel like these snakes are so common as pets that this could be something interesting to look into because I'm sure it could have an effect on their development.
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